One mistake some people make in teaching letter sounds is to teach children by the first letter in a word, saying these words are similar: bell, bike, ball, book. Unfortunately, although each of these words starts with the same consonant sound—the letter B, the brain does not organize words by beginning letter sounds. When you introduce new words that contain several vowel sounds as in the example above, it is very confusing to children who are struggling to read. The brain identifies words by (and we learn to pronounce words by) the vowel sound in the word. Therefore, we need to teach children to read by using words that have common vowel sounds: at, back, cat, fat, hat, mat…. If we teach using the organizational structure that the brain uses, it makes it easier for at-risk students to learn. I call it vowel clustering. The children in my reading clinic learn to decode and encode words by vowel sounds. For example, the letter A has 7 sounds and 22 different ways to make those sounds.

Here is the Mr. A puppet that children make and cover with words that they have captured.

We always start with the letter A. Then, we study I and U, before tackling the more difficult vowel sounds for O and E. It’s not important to go in order: A, E, I, O, and U. It actually helps children to mix easier vowel sounds in between the harder sounds.

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Elaine Clanton Harpine, Ph.D.

Elaine is a program designer with many years of experience helping at-risk children learn to read. She earned a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology (Counseling) from the Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.